I've installed the beta patch and am pleased to see some nice fixes that seem to work so far -- thank you!

I'm not so sure how well some of the ship AI is working, but maybe that is because I am using 1.7.10 on a 1.7.7 game?

In any case, I do not understand these things, perhaps I am missing something, can you help me please? Thank you!

1. Design 1: I do not understand how to use the new 4 sections of ships (private / state, base / ship) to my advantage, aside from having the ship lists shorter now (because split into 4) 2. Design 2: My designs set to "automatically upgrade" (the private ones) do NOT seem to upgrade. They've never changed. No no engines, for instance, and nothing else new that I can see. I'm not sure what I am doing wrong. 3. Design 3: When I hit upgrade manually, most designs don't seem to do so: e.g., the AI does not add new components, such as targetting computers or damage control. What am I doing wrong?

4. I didn't use the game setup: colonization distance slider, but I'm not sure what that is supposed to help me with. Isn't colonizing as far as you can to gain territory like ... good? 5. ditto with territory slider. What is this supposed to do?

1. This is just a filter. I change the miner bases at the start so it is good to isolate them as an example. It doesn't do anything more than that.

2. I'm struggling a bit with this too. My 'automatic' upgrades tend to revert back to the AI designs and still leave my originals untouched.

3. Not seeing a change here either. Would be cool if it gave suggestions or colour coded the missing components in the list at least.

4. Colonization slider is the distance away from one of your other planets that you can send a colony ship. It is a game limiter but I'm really liking it because it makes you take crap planets if it opens up new opportunities. It is only for colonization so just attack independents if they are outside the range.

5. This is the size of the territory bubble around your planets. I just leave it as the default.

I agree. The filtering thing is fine, but the fundamental problem with the ship design screen is that the AI decides which components to put on each design, seeming to work from scratch each time they are to do an upgrade.

We need to be able to select those components which will be upgraded when an upgrade is available and those which will be left alone. Alternatively, if we had a way to select which components would be available for use in upgrades and which would not, it would help. The AI selects what it sees as the "newest" tech to upgrade to, and that is frequently not what the designer wants. Good examples are hyperdrives, shields etc where the AI will undo a design I have manually modified and revert to older or less effective techs.

The upgrade button only switches outdated components for new ones. It doesn't meddle with your designs so if you unlocked a new component that doesn't replace anything already on your designs you'll have to add it manually.